Examining Undergraduate Students’ Information Literacy Skills through a Cultural Capital Lens

Cultural capital is a sociological theory that identifies different social assets that contribute to the social mobility of individuals in a society. Cultural capital theory has been studied in the field of education, but has not made its way more prominently into library research. Conversely, information literacy theories have been widely studied by librarian researchers due to a heavy interest in assessing information literacy skill development. This leads to the question: does cultural capital in any way correlate to the development of information literacy skills? Researchers at two different campuses of an R1 university are currently studying this question. Their study is longitudinal, taking place over the first two years of students’ college experience. This session will introduce participants to the theory of cultural capital and describe the researchers’ ongoing longitudinal study with some selected preliminary data gained from the first of three surveys.